Life After
by Five Minutes Til Bedtime
Summary: When he was a child, he yearned for normal. Now that he is a man, he finds happiness not in a white picket fence or a beautiful girl who loves him but in the solid fact that he can do anything. Normal is so overrated.


Title: **Life After**

Fandom: Harry Potter

Word Count: 1,773

Summary: When he was a child, he yearned for normal. Now that he is a man, he finds happiness not in a white picket fence or a beautiful girl who loves him but in the solid fact that he can do anything. Normal is so overrated.

* * *

Harry Potter comes out of that war with a fading scar on his forehead and a growing sense of discontent.

Not at first, of course. Immediately after the Fall of the Dark Lord (the papers and the history books still won't say his name, superstitious to the last) Harry felt nothing but a flood of relief that left him shaking and numb, as though the weight that he'd finally pushed off his shoulders had left his body too light and flimsy for the heavy soul within. Ron and Hermione help him reach the Gryffindor common room where they collapse onto the couch in a heap of three bodies turned one and sleep and sleep and sleep.

Harry awakes last; regardless that he has a far bigger core than most wizards he still used the most magic of the three of them (not to mention the dying and coming back bit) and his body simply demanded it's rest. When he opens his eyes for the next time it is 33 hours since the Final Battle and he is staring at the top of a ginger head that most certainly doesn't not belong to Ron.

Harry breathes in deep the smell of the woman pressed against his side and believes that he has found his new path in life. They try dating for all of three months, both pushing almost desperately to make the pieces of their hearts align as they once had. When it ends it is with Ginny's gentle arms around his neck as she kisses him goodbye one last time, picks up her bags, and goes. In another month she will be training for the next season of professional Quidditch and he will still be waiting for the sadness to kick in as he tries to remind himself that breakups are a normal part of life and all he's ever wanted is to be normal, right?

He lasts in Great Britain just long enough to see Ron and Hermione finally tie the knot and to acknowledge that Andromeda will never allow him to be anything more than a distant uncle to Teddy. He goes not in secret nor in a blast of fanfare – he simply sells most of his things, packs up the rest, promises to write those who matter to him and departs.

The day before he leaves he takes one last swoop through Diagon Alley trying to rekindle the wonder that he once felt when he was eleven and the world was new and bright. He meets George at the shop and trades his own brittle smile for the one he is given. It is the first time that Harry and George have ever been alone together and when George breaks down that night and asks him about death, Harry tells him every detail that he had kept so tightly locked inside his heart. They finish the last of Fred's fire whiskey together and in the morning George runs outside for a few minutes and returns with a tawny great owl that he pushes into Harry's arms until his arms close around the cage.

"He isn't Hedwig, but you'll need someone to carry your letters. Trust me, mate, you'll be thankful for the company when you're gone. Being alone isn't very fun after all."

Harry closes his mouth and accepts the cage after that. George walks him to the apparition point and calls him brother when they hug goodbye. Neither are shamed by the tears on their cheeks.

In six months, George will hire Lee Jordan as the new manager for the store and depart from the Alley himself. Though he'll continue to send back new product up until the day that he dies he will never return to work at the store that he and his brother built together. The weight of their shared dream was simply too heavy for a man so lonely to bear.

More people follow them. The entire Malfoy family leaves Britain once and for all and returns to their ancestral home in France where they will, over the long rolling years that follow, establish themselves as a strictly neutral family and, in the generations to come, are commemorated for their wise and balanced council as well as their mercy and leniency to extend second chances. The year before any Malfoy child is to begin schooling they are presented to three ancient family portraits of Draco, Narcissa, and Lucius who, one by one, exactly what it means to be a Malfoy. The word mudblood is never spoken in their halls again. Children are taught to spell those who say such a thing spit out slugs.

Luna regains weight and the light in her eyes and doesn't so much as intentionally leave Britain as she slowly drifts beyond the borders of her home until she is one day squatting in a river in South America looking at invisible creatures for her new book and is spied upon by a love stricken hiker named Rolf.

A wave of muggle-borns leave the wizarding world for good, including one Justin Finch-Fletcher who goes on to coach children's football.

Harry does not coach football or discover creatures or moves to France (though he does visit). Outside of Britian it becomes embarrassingly clear that one Harry James Potter is simply not cut out for the normal life. He picks up women often and sincerely but they quickly find his chivalry, his determination to save the world worrying and too much to handle bow out quickly, one after one. On a whim he buys a house in a suburb in America, but he comes home one day from buying groceries and scowls at the state of his yard so fiercely for being must less well-kept than those down the street that he almost becomes physically ill when he realizes how much he sounds like his long forgotten uncle and simpering aunt. He sells the house so quickly his realtor's head spins and he accepts that normality is simply not for him.

Luckily for Harry, the turn of the twenty-first century brings on a dawn of a new age where normal becomes a rare thing. He wonders the big cities and follows the news from the inside of coffee shops and sports bars. He's only ever had one home and the knowledge that Hogwarts is being rebuilt allows him to flit from place to place without guilt or exhaustion.

Many times he is nothing more than a bystander, watching as battles take place and standing by to quietly tip the balance in the right direction. He carries his father's cloak and wears it often. Whether it is casting subtle shielding charms on the dark night of Gotham or letting his magic tug Tony Stark out from a portal to another world his actions are neither flashy nor noticed, as he prefers.

His face is just another in the crowd as his hands (his wand) works silent magic on those in need.

It is not that he is in hiding. Indeed, seldom does a month go by without some organization or cause turn up on his doorstep asking for assistance. He says yes to no one, but to the sincere it isn't unlikely to find him suddenly in the mix of a battle or a protest one minute there and another turning the tide. He is no longer afraid of stepping into the limelight, though he finds his place more speaking gently to children or humbly at the dinner tables of those that he has helped.

He doesn't call himself a hero – never has – but that doesn't stop the rest of the worlds from talking.

He spends his Christmas days as he always had, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Weasley and her brood. His Christmas Eve's however are his own and he spends them with a mess of people – one night of awkward eagerness with the Malfoys, one night getting smashed beyond repair with George, one night racing the stars across the Atlantic with his Firebolt, another sitting stiffly as Dudley introduced his fiancé and smiled a very un-Dursleyish grin.

On Halloweens he visits Godric's Hallow and pays his respects to the most important strangers in his life. He goes to graveyard very rarely, only one night of the year. He can't help but feel as though Death is watching him, silently glowering at the one who got away from him. Still, there is no one in the world quite like parents, and Harry kneels at their graves with flowers (never lilies) and ignores the skeleton hand that rests on his shoulder and breathes down his neck.

He finds that he is happy – and it takes him a while to come to term with that fact. He is alone more days that he is not. He has plenty of friends, but no one at his side. He has no place but a castle he no longer fits in to call home and his has no little children with sticky faces to smile at him. There is no white picket fence for him, and the dreams of a normal life that he held onto so tightly as a child no longer seem to matter.

But he is happy. Sometimes deliriously so. And though he is often alone, he is never lonely. He has friends on every continent who would gladly accept him into their homes and lives in an instant, should he ask. When he wishes, there are warm bodies and soft laughter to fill his night – maybe not permanently, but perhaps that is all that he needs for now.

His sense of self changes frequently, though the core of who he is – savior, wizard, a stubborn child, and a strong heart – never shifts. One day he nothing more than a shadow on a wall, the next he is a cool collected figure stepping up calmly to give a speech at a rally. He is a wanderer sticking out his thumb on the roads of California, if only to meet new company. He is a pick-up Quidditch player star, a young man who goes out for drinks on the town with his mates, and waggles his eyebrows at all the pretty girls. He is a still figure on the cliffs of China, toes the line between earth and sky with a smile on his face.

In the end, it is not where he settles but the skin in which he settles into which determines his fate. And he finds that, though there is nothing normal in what he does or who he is, he quite alright with that.


End file.
